Tagged:  Publishing innovation

“...it is not a project with a deadline, it is our never-ending quest to explore better ways to deliver the formal published record." — IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Vice President Content Innovation, S&T Journals

With the rapid advance of new technology, publishers have been required to think creatively about the way they provide communications to the scientific community.

But while the transition from print to online has been relatively smooth, the content of scientific articles, and the way they are presented, still follows a tried and tested formula laid down almost 350 years ago.

According to Marie Sheehan, Head of Communications for Innovation and Product Development, S&T Journals, this is a missed opportunity, and one that Elsevier is keen to address with its innovative ‘Article of the Future’ project.

The project aims to break away from the traditional ‘abstract, findings, conclusion, references’ format, and to radically transform the ‘reader experience’. The latest milestone in this ongoing project is the introduction of the ‘three-pane’ version of the article, prototypes of which will be unveiled in June this year at www.articleofthefuture.com.

An Article of the Future prototype in the field of Electro-Chemistry

While the prototypes featured on the website relate to seven specific scientific disciplines, the concept will apply to all journals and visitors will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the new content and layout, before being invited to take part in a short online survey.

Sheehan says: “We really hope people will take the time to let us know what they think – we want to collect input from a broad range of disciplines to ensure we are meeting authors’ and editors’ needs, and to address those in future releases.”

Commenting on the project, Sheehan adds: “The first thing to make clear is that this is not a new Elsevier product, it is not a ‘thing’. Article of the Future is a process, a journey we are on to change the scientific article with regard to three key areas: content, context and presentation."

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Vice President Content Innovation, S&T Journals, explains: “As an author you want your work to be propelled, you want it to receive maximum exposure. And the more value your paper offers, the more it is seen, the more it is cited and that has a knock-on effect not only for the author, but also for the journal and the editorial board, as well as for the author’s institute.

“With Article of the Future we want to provide the best possible place to expose and explore research. But it is not a project with a deadline, it is our never-ending quest to explore better ways to deliver the formal published record. It is an ongoing journey with milestones, collaborations, results and ideas.”

One of those collaborations has taken the form of a partnership with 150 researchers from a range of disciplines who have been consulted each step of the way during the project’s process, via user interviews, behavior studies and tests. Together with Elsevier, they have focused on three main areas: content, context, and presentation.

Content

Authors can now add their own discipline-specific and rich content such as interactive plots, chemical compounds, or interactive maps. Furthermore, new possibilities such as graphical abstracts and research highlights will enable users to more efficiently skim articles.

Context

The context element offers authors opportunities to add a range of valuable connections to the published article, for example related research data sets, author information and research groups. Commonly used entities in the article can also be tagged and linked to databases, e.g. Genbank and Protein Data Bank, and context can also be pulled from these databases into the articles.

While many of the new content and context features will apply to all journals, others will be domain-specific.

Sheehan explains: “For example, Google maps (an application that enriches an article with research data visualized on an interactive map) has already been added to earth sciences, life sciences and social sciences journals and can be rolled out to other journals as needed.”

Presentation

Presentation looks at the ‘readability’ of the article and aims to surpass the current HTML and traditional PDF with new content elements and better navigation.

Sheehan says: “One clear message we received during the partnership process was that researchers do want all the domain-specific bells and whistles that technology can add to a scientific paper, but they also want to simply focus on the message in that paper, which led us to a very clean reading pane in the middle of the three-pane view.”

The left pane will contain navigation options enabling quicker exploration of the article, while the right pane will allow for new article content elements and context exploration beyond the paper.

An Article of the Future prototype in the field of Parasitology and Tropical Diseases

Aalbersberg adds: “As the three-pane design separates navigation and extensions from the core article, it minimizes distraction and unobtrusively and intuitively connects the clean reading with the new content and context.”

Rollout

As with many findings uncovered by the Article of the Future project, the three-pane view will be released on SciVerse ScienceDirect. Please take a few moments to view the prototypes at www.articleofthefuture.com and complete the short online questionnaire.

Have you seen the Article of the Future? If so, we'd love to hear your views via our comment function at the bottom of this page.

Author Biography

Marie Sheehan

Marie Sheehan
HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS
Marie is Head of Communications for the Innovation and Product Development department in Elsevier’s S&T Journals division. Since joining Elsevier in 2002, she has held various marketing and communications positions in the publishing organization.

Related Articles

• Issue 29 - March 2010: Graphical abstracts: a new way of summarising journal articles
• Issue 28 - November 2009: Experience the ‘Article of the future’
• Issue 26 - May 2009: Scientific investment

“Applications are the new form of publications on the web." — Vishal Gupta, Director, Developer Network

The launch of the SciVerse platform in 2010 provided a forward-driven and collaborative scientific community with access to the world’s largest source of peer-reviewed content. SciVerse holds an abstract and citation database containing 41 million records - 70% with abstracts - and nearly 18,000 titles from 5,000 publishers worldwide.

In November 2010, Elsevier expanded the service offered by the platform with the addition of SciVerse Applications, a gallery offering a new way of sharing knowledge, insight and improvement in workflows; all supported by steady input and feedback from the global research and developer community engaged through the Developer Network.

Jay Katzen, MD of A&G Markets, explains: “We spent a significant amount of time doing research with librarians and researchers across all segments including academic, government, corporate and health science.”

Referring to the new developments on SciVerse he adds: “Our goal is to foster the creation of a new type of community to collaborate and drive innovation, much like you see with Apple, Facebook, Google and others.”

Trusted Partnerships

By opening up its content, Elsevier’s Developer Network is leading the way for engaging experts from all subject areas to develop applications using available APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The flourishing of this new scientific knowledge ecosystem, a concept brought to the public by Rafael Sidi (VP, Application Marketplace and Developer Network), was preceded by a number of trends: a call for openness and interoperability, personalization of information and an increasing need for trusted collaboration.

“As researchers become increasingly bogged down by information overload, creating tools to help them is crucial." — Michelle Lee, Director of Product Management, SciVerse Applications

Apps are being created to increase collaboration between researchers such as the Co-Author Visualizer, Prolific Authors, and Expert Search etc. On a broader scale, partnerships have become significant in the development of apps.

Vishal Gupta (Director, Developer Network) points to the venture between the US’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Elsevier: “This resulted in the launch of the Data.gov app and illustrates how researchers, government and web scientists are accessing scholarly content and linking this with government datasets to provide a richer experience to the end users in their scientific research.”

Some of the SciVerse applications now available

Another example is the Reflect-Network application, integrated within the life sciences journals on SciVerse Science Direct via Reflect, a tool that tags proteins and chemicals in a document. It addresses the workflow challenges of life sciences researchers by helping them quickly understand and visualize the content of an article. The application was developed in partnership with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Germany, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (CPR), University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

More than 3,000 interviews with librarians, information specialists and researchers have been conducted in a long preamble leading up to the emergence of SciVerse Applications and the Developer Network.  As Katzen remarks: “This is a way that developers can work with researchers, or researchers can become developers themselves and customize or make applications based on article content, author data, affiliation data, and abstracts…to really deliver more value for the end user.”

The necessity of collaboration is not new in research. It is deeply ingrained in the authoring and peer-review process. “Applications too need to be reviewed.  Product managers in the SciVerse Applications team spend considerable time engaging and supporting developers to review and ensure high quality apps.  In addition, users will also be able to review and provide direct feedback to the developer,” says Michelle Lee, Director of Product Management, SciVerse Applications.

Gupta takes this a step further: “Applications are the new form of publications on the web. They can provide additional insights to the researcher and can be accompanied by an applications note that can be further published in the traditional way. The use of the applications in the context of the underlying content will also enrich the value of the journal content, which in turn will help increase the journal usage and make it the ‘destination of choice’.”

Centered on categories such as collaboration, search, management (of information) and analysis (of information), applications will slowly pervade a researcher’s career. Supporting multidisciplinary research, applying ontology and semantic driven searches, bringing the exploration of numerous datasets to manageable proportions and offering valuable insight into author networks are a few examples of the significance of SciVerse Applications for research communities.

Increasing content value

Lee elaborates: “As researchers become increasingly bogged down by information overload, creating tools to help them is crucial. These could be simple apps, like the eReader Formats app that allows a researcher to download a PDF and put it on his iPad. Or they can be highly analytical apps like quantiFind that extract and aggregate data from our corpus and visualize that to illustrate trends. SciVerse Applications enables a radically different approach to how our customers and end users approach our content."

Author Biography

Gwendolyn Holstege

Gwendolyn Holstege
PUBLISHING ENABLEMENT MANAGER
Gwendolyn has recently started work for the Media and Communities team of the A&G Markets department of Elsevier in Amsterdam. She is responsible for keeping the needs of authors, editors and reviewers top of mind when these relate to the online solutions Elsevier offers like SciVerse (ScienceDirect, Scopus, Applications ) and SciVal  (Spotlight, Funding, Strata). Prior to that, she worked in a number of different roles for A&G Markets. Gwen holds an MA from the University of Amsterdam.

Related Articles

• Issue 31 - December 2010: SciVerse: A New Era in Search and Discovery
• Issue 30 - August 2010: The Heart of a New Science Ecosystem
• Issue 25 - February 2009: A One Stop Shop for Editors

"...we really want potential authors to see what we can now do for them in the digital environment with all that means for enhancing, and building functionality around, the article.” — David Clark, Senior Vice President, Physical Sciences

As a continuation of the discussion raised in the March 2010 issue of Editors’ Update, concerning the trend from print marketing activities to online journal marketing, we would like to update you on recent developments. As Elsevier publishes more than 95% of its information online, and with the increasing use of smart content and APIs, the move from print publishing to digital dissemination is firmly rooted within the research community.

It is therefore a logical step for Elsevier to reflect this trend across all areas of the scientific publishing process. In the Marketing Communications team for Science and Technology (S&T) journals, a decision to focus on marketing journal content digitally has led to the removal of print sample copies at exhibitions. Instead, this team is channeling its efforts into improving journal visibility through online methods.

Stepping into a new era

“We have developed many online features to enhance our digital marketing campaigns such as CiteAlert, and community-wide announcements on publication speeds and Impact Factor results,” explains Nicoline van der Linden, Vice President Marketing Communications. “We have been using RSS feeds for some time now and recently we have been strengthening our presence on research and scientific blogs; social media channels; search engine optimization and search engine marketing to make our journals even more visible than in the print era.”

The first issue of a journal published each year continues to be freely accessible via SciVerse ScienceDirect. At exhibitions where Elsevier is present, laptops or iPads are used to demonstrate this feature to potential and existing authors. Visitors are also shown how online articles can be ordered directly from the exhibition booth and sent via SciVerse ScienceDirect. “Many visitors make use of this digital and environmentally-friendly service,” notes van der Linden.

More recently, developments in technology such as smart phones and iPads have enabled Elsevier to experiment in the field of mobile applications. The Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) launched the JACC iPad edition at the end of 2010, offering everything researchers had come to expect from their weekly issue, but enhanced with editor-selected resources from CardioSource and other integrated features. Elsevier’s Personal Selections application allows researchers to keep up-to-date by accessing the latest 25 articles (abstracts and full texts) based on their selection of keywords.  “These and other developments confirm how Elsevier is committed to continually serving the research community innovatively,” adds van der Linden.

Exceptions to the rule

According to David Clark, Senior Vice President Physical Sciences, “while there may be times when having a specific journal issue at a meeting can be useful, we really want potential authors to see what we can now do for them in the digital environment with all that means for enhancing, and building functionality around, the article”.

The author of the future

There seems to be little disputing that addressing authors’ needs, both current and future, remains a challenge that all STM publishers face. Embracing and enhancing new trends, though at times experimental, can lead to breakthroughs in how we connect with the author of tomorrow. As an editor there are a number of ways we can work together with you on your journal to ensure it remains at the forefront of your community. Your marketing communications manager or publishing contact can inform you further of the marketing plan in place for your journal.

We want to hear your thoughts

1. What techniques do you already use to digitally promote your journal within the community?
2. Are you active in scientific or research blogs? If so, which ones?
3. Do you use social media in your role as a journal editor?

Please take a few moments to post your comments.

Author Biographies

Nicoline van der Linden

Nicoline van der Linden
VICE PRESIDENT MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
Nicoline oversees the marketing efforts for our S&T journals and scientific conferences. She started her career as a Molecular Biologist, followed by various publishing and management positions at Elsevier where she handled a variety of portfolios in Health Sciences, Life Sciences and Engineering. Nicoline was educated at the Universities of Amsterdam and Basel, as well as the Rotterdam School of Management.

David Clark

David Clark
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT PHYSICAL SCIENCES
David oversees our program in physics, mathematics, computer science and materials which includes both some of the newest and longest-standing Elsevier journal titles. Previously he was a publishing director for physics and mathematics, publishing director for economics and a publisher for economics and for geography. David was educated at Oxford and London Universities.

Related Articles:

• Issue 30 - August 2010: Science and Online Networking
• Issue 26 - May 2009: Mapping STM investments in the digital age
• Issue 26 - May 2009: The true value of e-journals

"...it is fair to say that the format of scholarly communications is, at this mid-point in the digital revolution, in an ill-defined transitional state — a ‘horseless carriage’..." Anita de Waard, Disruptive Technologies Director, Elsevier Labs

This summer, together with a group of well-known academics, Elsevier Labs co-organized a Perspectives workshop at Dagstuhl Castle in Germany.

Entitled Force11: Future Research Communications and e-Scholarship 2011, it was a meeting of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders who, individually and collectively, aim to bring about a change in scholarly communication through the effective use of information technology. As a key outcome, the group has just published the Force11 Manifesto, a description of issues identified as impeding change and a vision and plan on how to overcome them.

What is Force11?

Force11 is a virtual community working to transform scholarly communications through advanced use of computers and the Web.

The challenges and proposals cover two separate aspects of scholarly publishing: the format of publications and technologies to enable query of, and access to, them; and the business of scholarly publishing, which includes models for assessing and validating science and scientists, and who pays precisely for what.

Bridging the technology gap

Concerning the first set of issues, it is fair to say that the format of scholarly communications is, at this mid-point in the digital revolution, in an ill-defined transitional state — a ‘horseless carriage’ — that lies somewhere between the world of print and paper and the world of the Web and computers, with the former still exercising significantly more influence than the latter. Then, most types of scholarship involve claims, and all sciences and many other fields require that these claims be independently testable.

Good results are often re-used, sometimes thousands of times. But actually obtaining the necessary materials, data or software for such re-use is far harder than it should be. Even in the rare cases where the data are part of the research communication, they are typically relegated to the status of ‘supplementary material’, whose format and preservation are currently inadequate.

The last issue pertaining to the form of scholarly communications deals with online access. Here, the knowledge discovery tools are much better but they struggle with the fragmentation of research communication caused by the rapid proliferation of increasingly specialized and overlapping journals.

The Force11 attendees on the steps of the chapel at Schloss Dagstuhl. Photo by Leibniz Centre for Informatics.

---

Exploring all avenues

Ideas for solutions included experimenting with new, enriched forms of scholarly publications consisting of rich and interconnected relationships between knowledge, claims and data. This would require the creation of a platform to create and share computationally executable components, such as workflows, computer code and statistical calculations as scientifically valid pieces of content, and the development of an infrastructure that would allow these components to be made accessible, reviewed, referenced and attributed. To do this, we would have to develop best practices for depositing research datasets in repositories, that enable linking to relevant documents and have high compliance levels driven by appropriate incentives, resources and policies.

For the scientific domain, new forms of publication must facilitate the reproducibility of results: the ability to preserve and re-perform executable workflows or services. This will require us to reconstruct the context within which these objects were created and track them as data objects that evolve through time. In this way, the content of communications about research will follow the same evolutionary path that we have seen for general Web content: a move from the static to the increasingly dynamic, and from top-down articles to grass-roots blogs.

It also means revisiting the narrative structure of scholarly papers, and identifying portions where this narrative may be better structured for improved computational access, without losing the strong cognitive impact that a good story can have.

The impact on editors

For editors, in particular, these futures offer exciting new opportunities. Next to publishing papers, there are new formats that enable the integration of researcher’s workflows, such as myExperiment, Taverna, Vis Trails and Wings. These allow authors to share, and readers to experience, not only a textual description of the methods followed in the publication, but to actually run these workflows on their own laptops, and thereby experience what steps were taken to arrive at experimental results.

Scientific data and software could also be much more tightly integrated with the journal article. In repositories such as Dryad or Dataverse, data, whether it be in the physical, life or social sciences, can be deposited and kept available. If the journal then decides to allow the addition of, e.g. statistical program components (such as R, SPSS or MatLab code), the data in the data repository can be rendered and replayed within the article context, allowing a richer representation of the science. Elsevier’s Executable Paper Grand Challenge offered a platform to display many of these new components, and several are being implemented today. 

Life beyond the Impact Factor

The Force11 group also agreed that if we are to explore and implement new forms of scholarly communication, we will need to implement radical changes to the complex socio-technical and commercial ecosystem of scholarly publishing. In particular, to obtain the benefits that networked knowledge promises, we have to explore new academic reward systems that encourage scholars and researchers to participate and contribute to these efforts. This means acknowledging that a journal Impact Factor is only one component to measure the true impact of scholarship and that it needs to be combined with other impact measures.

We need to develop new mechanisms that allow us to measure the true contribution a particular record of scholarship makes to the world’s store of knowledge. It also requires all those involved in the scholarly information life cycle to acknowledge that current business models are no longer adequate support for the rich, variegated, integrated and disparate knowledge offerings which new technologies enable, new scholarship requires, and new players in the scholarly field (including non-Western countries and the general public) deserve.

In a collaboration involving scholars, publishers, libraries, funding agencies, academic institutions, and software developers, we need to develop models that can enable this exciting future to develop, while offering sustainable forms of existence to all parties.

The impact of these developments for journal editors would be better integration of journal articles with the rest of the knowledge ecosystem that scientists exist in today. Efforts such as Altmetrics, MESUR (both of which Elsevier is actively collaborating with) and others, aim to expand our concept of impact measures and ensure a high-quality representation of downloads, views, blog links and other elements. In many forums (e.g. see list of workshops below), we are actively engaging in a constructive dialogue with the Open Science/Data/Access movement, to develop ways of integrating existing and new business models.

Mapping out the path ahead 

The overall conclusion of the Force11 group is that the changing formats, tools, roles and business models of scholarly publishing form an immense challenge for libraries, publishers and software developers. The only fruitful way forward, we firmly believe, will be for all parties collaborating to build new tools that optimally support scholarship in a distributed open environment. Only by creating a demonstrably better research environment will we convince the entire system of scholarly communication and merit assessment to adopt new forms and models.

A great outcome of the Force11 meeting was that several library groups are interested in joining Force11, and working together to redefine ‘the research library of the future’. There appears to be a great amount of ideas, tools, and enthusiasm to do this work, and a willingness and interest to do this collaboratively. We are very much looking forward to strengthening the connections made this year, and developing plans to help build these fundamentally new platforms in 2012.

A (non-exhaustive) list of workshops about transforming scholarly communication held in 2011:

• January: A semantic, molecular future
• January: Beyond the PDF
• May: Harvard eScience Workshop
• May: Royal Dutch Academy Open Data Day
• June: Alt-Metrics: Tracking scholarly impact on the social Web
• August: Force11
• August: Data Attribution and Citation Workshop
• September: Science Online London
• October: Microsoft Research eScience workshop
• November: Open Access

Do you share the views of Force11? Where do you see scholarly communications heading in the years to come? Let us know by posting a comment below.

Author Biography

"We get feedback...that new content elements like these are very useful and do help in better and more quickly digesting the research being presented." IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Vice President Content Innovation

As we reach the end of 2011, Elsevier’s innovative Article of the Future project is embarking on an important new chapter in its development.

The project aims to revolutionize the traditional format of academic papers with regard to three key elements: presentation, content and context.

To achieve this, a three-pane article view has been proposed, which separates navigation (left pane) and value-added enhancements (right pane) from the core article (middle pane).

What is Article of the Future?

Article of the Future is an innovation project geared towards enhancing the online article to support researchers in communicating their work in the electronic era. The aims of this ongoing project are:

• to provide authors with the best possible place to digitally disseminate scientific research, and
• to increase value to readers by providing an environment that offers an optimal reading experience, making it possible to build deep insights quickly.

Three core elements of the article – presentation, content and context - will be rolling out this year and throughout 2012.

Presentation

This next phase in the project’s journey will see the left and middle panes released on SciVerse ScienceDirect, with a focus on the presentation element.

In Issue 32 of Editors’ Update in June, we profiled the Article of the Future website where 13 prototypes are available to view. Visitors to the site are also encouraged to share their thoughts on the new design in a survey.

So far, more than 700 researchers have taken part in this survey. Their suggestions have been combined with the feedback of the 150 researchers who were consulted throughout the development stages. A clear theme emerging is that while researchers like all the domain-specific advances that technology can add to a paper, they also want to be free to focus on the core message in that paper. This has led the Article of the Future team to further refine the middle reading pane to offer readers a spacious and uncluttered view, improving on the current online HTML article available on SciVerse ScienceDirect.

Figure 1: The HTML article currently hosted on SciVerse ScienceDirect.

Figure 2: The new, easier-to-read Article of the Future layout. The left and center panes will be rolled out shortly.

Hylke Koers, Content Innovation Manager, explains: “The main objective of this presentation-focused release is to introduce the best possible online reading experience in regards to typography and layout, using lessons learned from the PDF to bring the readability advantages that such a style offers to the web.”

According to IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Vice President Content Innovation for Science & Technology Journals, the improvements to the presentation aspect of the Article of the Future also pave the way for future developments. He says: “A cleaner presentation is needed in order to take advantage of the content and context enhancements that have yet to be rolled out.”

Content

Though the upcoming SciVerse ScienceDirect release will focus mainly on presentation, enhancing article content is the key theme of the Article of the Future project. The aim is to increasingly enrich the value of research articles by including new and interactive content elements, mostly discipline-specific and key to the scientist’s research and workflow. In the last few months we have already introduced a number of such content enrichments, with many more to come.

The most recent examples are Genome Viewer, Protein Interaction Viewer and Google Maps Viewer (see figure 3). “We get feedback from our community that new content elements like these are very useful and do help in better and more quickly digesting the research being presented,” says Aalbersberg.

Figure 3: The Google Maps Viewer as currently available on SciVerse ScienceDirect.

What you can expect

These and upcoming content enhancements provide a number of benefits to authors, which in turn will improve the ‘user experience’ for journals and their readers. Those benefits include:The ability to share new forms of research output – multimedia, interactive data, computer code, enriched visualizations, etc…Inline support of rich files, such as MOL files for chemical structures or KML files for geographically organized data.

Optimal opportunities to expose research, putting it in front of readers in a way that allows them to develop deep insights more efficiently, for example using Google Maps.We are always keen to hear what new content elements editors would find useful in journal articles.  If you have an idea you would like to share, please let us know. You can email IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg at ij.j.aalbersberg@elsevier.com

Context

The third core element of the Article of the Future project is context and we are improving that in multiple ways. The trend of storing research data sets at external data repositories is gaining ground and we support this by linking entities and articles to those repositories. As the article is not a one-way street, rather a roundabout that serves to connect with other sources of scientific information on the web, it’s important that information from trusted sources can be displayed alongside the online article.

“We are particularly keen to work together with data set repositories to establish connections between articles (the scholarly record) and underlying (or otherwise relevant) research data as there are numerous advantages to both author and reader,” Aalbersberg adds.

Researchers sometimes prefer independent data repositories over publisher websites as they benefit from domain-specific coordination and organization. Connecting data and articles helps to increase visibility, discoverability and usage both ways, while providing context to the data and avoiding misinterpretation and incorrect usage. Elsevier believes that raw research data should be freely accessible to researchers, and demonstrates this via entity and article linking, and the use of SciVerse applications for linking.

• Entity Linking: making links between entities mentioned in the article (e.g., proteins or standards – there is a range of possibilities) to relevant information about that entity (example:  Protein Data Bank for proteins and a standard database for standards).
• Article Linking: making links between an article as a whole and entries in a data repository – like an experimental data set underlying the research presented in the article or curated data from the research article (e.g. CCDC, EarthChem).
• Applications: pulling data from a data repository into the article and bringing that to the reader to explore in the context of the article – often with some form of interactivity (e.g. information on genes is pulled from the NCBI GenBank, and is shown alongside the article).

Elsevier is applying this contextual data linking by working with many different repositories, including PANGAEA, CCDC, NCBI, PDB, and (recently added) EarthChem.

As an editor of an Elsevier journal, what database would you like to see connected to your journal article content?  If you know of one that is widely used and recognized, and well-organized and maintained, we would be interested in adding it to the program. Help us to increase the extent and impact of this initiative and benefit your journal and its readers by contacting IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg at ij.j.aalbersberg@elsevier.com

As we prepare to introduce both readers and authors to the next phase of the Article of the Future journey, our sights are already set on 2012, when ongoing content enhancements will follow the upcoming release of the new presentation style. Expect to hear more from us during the upcoming year!

Author Biography

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg
VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT INNOVATION
From 1999-2002, IJsbrand Jan served as the Vice President of Technology at Elsevier Engineering Information (Hoboken, USA). As Technology Director for Science & Technology from 2002-2005, he was one of the initiators of Scopus, responsible for its publishing-technology connection. In 2006, he switched his focus as Technology Director to Elsevier’s Corporate Markets. Since taking on the role of Vice President Content Innovation in 2009, he has strived to help scientists communicate research in ways they weren’t able to do before. IJsbrand Jan holds a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science.

Related Links

• Issue 32 – June 2011: Have you seen the Article of the Future?
• Issue 29 - March 2010: Graphical abstracts: a new way of summarising journal articles
• Issue 28 - November 2009: Experience the ‘Article of the future’
• Issue 26 - May 2009: Scientific investment

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg | Senior Vice President, Journal & Content Technology, Elsevier

Today’s research increasingly uses electronic tools to generate and capture its output, in many more formats than just text and images. In order to meet this change in behavior of the academic community and use these tools and data in research communication as well, we need to adapt and improve the research article. This is what Content Innovation at Elsevier is all about.

The ongoing Article of the Future project set Elsevier’s online article redesign in motion, and developed an infrastructure to implement discipline-specific Content Innovation applications. Today’s article experience on SciVerse ScienceDirect means easier reading and navigation, including applications that enrich the publication with interactive content and additional contextual information.

To give you an idea of what the Article of the Future project is about, and where we are heading, take a look at the video below.

We’ve already added various discipline-specific apps like including and presenting chemistry MOL files, providing fully annotated and interactive geographical maps, and a fully interactive Protein Viewer. However, what we’d like to know from you is:

What Content Innovation do YOU need to make YOUR journal more valuable?

To give you an idea of the sort of innovations already introduced, let's take a closer look at one of them: Google Maps.

Elsevier has recently rolled out support for Interactive Maps to 80+ journals in subject areas ranging from Archaeology to Social Economics, and from Oceanography to Earth Observations. Utilizing Google Maps, this application enriches online articles on SciVerse ScienceDirect with an interactive map that presents the author’s research data in a visual, easily accessible, and interactive manner. This helps the reader to quickly appreciate the relevance of the presented research, and to build a deeper understanding of the data through interactive exploration – all in the context of the research article.

The Interactive Map viewer works with KML files that are uploaded by the authors using the regular EES submission system. Because KML is a very common data format, authors can use a choice of their preferred Geographic Information System applications software to create these files. Elsevier will then generate interactive maps from the submitted KML files and include these in the online article.

More information and instructions are available on elsevier.com/googlemaps

Check out our website for inspiration, and work with us in developing the discipline-specific Content Innovation for YOUR journal. All discussions and suggestions are welcome and can be passed on to your publishing contact.

Elizabeth Przybysz | Project Manager, Journal Development, Elsevier

Challenging publishing dogmas in the e-leading era

According to the National Information Standards Organization¹, references perform two essential functions in research and publishing: they ensure that credit is given to the people and organizations whose previous works have contributed to that research, and they enable users of the references to uniquely identify and locate the original data and source the materials used.

What does this mean in today’s world? Fewer and fewer libraries and individuals subscribe to a print version of a journal. Even when libraries maintain a print version, readers access journals electronically. Some may still consult the source cited by visiting a local library, but the vast majority expect to have instant access to cited sources via linking services (such as CrossRef, PubMed, Scopus, or Web of Science) from the journal content platform provided through their institute.

The importance of these linking services does not end there. They monitor and analyze the online traffic, providing information on how many citations an article or an author has received. This not only ensures that the appropriate credit is given to an author of the cited material, but can also measure the importance of that research using various metrics (e.g. total citations, h-index). To provide an accurate picture, it is vital that all references can be tracked and that all sources are accounted for. This can only be guaranteed if an author, preparing the references, provides all the relevant metadata required by the linking services.

Reference formatting becomes irrelevant

Elsevier titles currently follow one of 10 standard styles, conforming to either the numbered or name/date master style; except for approximately 300 titles that follow their own non-standard style. All of these are legacy styles from the print era. Journals follow a particular style used within a scientific community or as a result of an editor’s personal choice. A non-standard reference style can certainly make the journal visually distinctive. However, none of these styles provides the optimal information for the linking services, with negative consequences on the discoverability of articles and authors in the online world. Elsevier has decided it is time to review the references styles from the point of view of meeting linking services requirements.

Reference styles in journals published by Elsevier

We discovered that some of the formatting requirements may work against effective linking, or are completely irrelevant. Nevertheless, the reader experience may call for their continued inclusion.

For example:

• the Vancouver style presents authors’ initials without a full stop, whereas a full stop is required by linking services to distinguish between multiple authors of an article;
• journal titles are not used to match references across databases, however, this information helps the reader put the reference in context; the various abbreviations models may be confusing to the authors and the readers;
• 1a Numbered & 1c Alphanumeric styles forbid the use of the article titles. This solution was designed in order to reduce the space consumed by the references, a factor irrelevant in virtual reality; and
• none of the styles emphasise the importance of DOIs, e-identifiers or URLs – a metadata type which on its own is sufficient to create a link.

A new approach to references will make our authors’ lives easier

According to E C Friedberg writing in Nature in 2005², most authors perceive “coping with the multitude of formats imposed by academic journals for citing references to the literature as aggravating and labour-intensive experience (...) What difference can it possibly make if an author’s initials are placed before or after his/her surname, or where exactly in the citation the date of a publication is situated— not to mention the myriad variations of required fonts, italics, colons, commas and full stops?”.

At Elsevier, we have already agreed that we should never return a manuscript for amendments on the basis of the references not following a particular style. We would prefer to focus authors’ attention on providing and checking the key metadata for linking rather than prompt them to check the correct abbreviation of the journal title.

The challenge in this case is: as long as the author provides the basic information needed to hyperlink the references, and does so consistently throughout their article, why don’t we instigate across all (Elsevier) titles, just two standard reference styles, one numbered and one name/date?

In some cases, a unique reference style may be required for the journal to be a part of a closed research community or scholarly society, and these exceptions will be honored. The reference style may be one of the features that render the journal’s visual style distinctive, but should it take precedence over article discoverability and author visibility?

Creating a more modern reference style is just one of the projects Elsevier is undertaking to make the publishing experience more author-friendly. Several other projects are underway to review the range of journal-specific style requirements currently in place at the different stages of publication. They are being challenged for their added value to the presented research, their relevance in the e-leading era, and their effect on publication times.

Back in 2005, when Friedberg - at the time Editor of the journal DNA Repair - raised a “Call for a cull of pointlessly different reference styles” ², to his disappointment there was not much reaction from other editors.

We are asking you now, as editors, to enter into the discussion – please post your thoughts or comments here, we would really like your feedback.

References:

¹ National Information Standard Organization, 09 June 2005 (cited 20 February2012) available:  http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/6545/Bibliographic%20References.pdf

² E C Friedberg, Call for a cull of pointlessly different reference styles, Nature (2005) 1232

Kelvin J A Davies, PhD, DSc | Editor-in-Chief, Free Radical Biology & Medicine

Imagine if contributors could submit their papers to a journal without worrying about formatting the manuscript, including those pesky references, to exacting specifications? Well that’s precisely what we at Free Radical Biology & Medicine have invited authors to do. Since July of 2011, we have encouraged contributors to submit ‘Your Paper, Your Way.’

As fellow scientists, I and my associate editors of Free Radical Biology & Medicine wondered why journals make people spend so much time and effort formatting their entire paper for submission, especially when it’s a journal with extremely high rejection rates. Although standard formats do make it just that little bit easier for editors and reviewers to see everything in the correct style, the reality is that the advantage is very small, and we should really be focusing on the quality of science and not the format. For authors the difference is very significant. Just think of all the time contributors spend doing secretarial formatting work on a paper, only to have it rejected immediately and be forced to repeat the whole process again for the next journal to which they submit their paper. An easier submission process not only saves time and effort but may also allow authors to achieve faster publication speeds.

In initiating ‘Your Paper, Your Way,’  Free Radical Biology & Medicine decided to invite all authors to submit their manuscripts as single PDF files, including all figures, figure legends, and references.  Of course, all scientific papers need to include the following key elements: title, abstract, introduction, materials & methods, results, discussion (or results and discussion combined), references, and figures and figure legends. Contributors can use whatever layout style suits them best, however, including references.  All we ask is that the paper has all the key elements, is legible, and that all figures are of sufficiently high quality to permit proper review.  If we don’t accept a paper, the authors will have saved valuable time and effort. If we do accept a paper we then have the authors format their work to fit the Free Radical Biology & Medicine style, but they really don’t mind at that point. Elsevier automatically actually converts any reference style to that of our journal at the time of acceptance, as long as the references contain all the normal information, including the paper title.

In addition to creating a ‘friendlier’ journal for scientists, ‘Your Paper, Your Way’ also allows us to capture scientifically excellent papers that almost made it into one of the top flight generalist journals, but were considered too specialist to be accepted; the authors don’t have to re-format their paper to then submit it to our specialist Free Radical Biology & Medicine journal.

As of January 2012, half a year after initiating ‘Your Paper, Your Way,’ approximately 50% of all the papers we receive now take advantage of this simplified submission system. We have not had any complaints from reviewers about the new system, and many authors have sent us letters of thanks and praise for the ease and simplicity of Your Paper, Your Way.’ The editors of Free Radical Biology & Medicine think that ‘Your Paper, Your Way’ represents a return to common sense and a genuine renewed focus on the rights and needs of authors. It also benefits our journal in numerous ways.  We look forward to seeing others try the ‘Your Paper, Your Way’ approach.